Communication is vital in the workplace. When it comes to making every member engaged, having a weekly report is handy for most teams. To summarize the task progress to managers will help you manage the work well. It is helpful to keep everyone updated on the current project status. Often, writing a report every week means a list of procedures.

This article introduces the definition, formats, templates, and helpful suggestions for writing weekly reports efficiently.



What is Weekly Report?

Before digging deeper, let’s first review what weekly reports are.

Typically, weekly reporting refers to an internal communication tool on the status of tasks. As a result, we also call them weekly project reports or weekly activities reports.

The meaning of weekly reports can be examined from two sides.  For managers or supervisors, a weekly recording serves as an instrument to track the employee’s plans and activities and a good reference for annual performance reviews. For common staff, a weekly report is an effective way of upward communication, telling managers your goals and what you are doing. An accurate and informative weekly progress report can be convincing proof of the results of your work.

Weekly Report
Weekly Report


How to Write Weekly Reports Efficiently?

To make weekly reports efficiently, it has to satisfy several prerequisites. Firstly, it must be clear and concise, and secondly, it has to be delivered in a real-time manner.



Make Reports Clear and Concise

There are some general suggestions on how to deliver your content of weekly report concisely.

Before everything starts, make sure you’re crystal clear about the goals of the report. For example, people in the sales department write reports to share sales KPIs every seven days. The marketing department may focus on marketing effects (such as traffic). The IT department may focus on the latest progress in project development.

Collect relevant data and display them in tables, graphs, and charts to make them look more intuitive. Graphs such as pie charts and progress bars are easy to understand and do not take too much report space. Simple charts of this kind are recommended. However, it should be noted not to use too complicated charts because they reduce the readability and increase your workload.

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Think about the friendliness of the reader when writing. Use simple language as much as possible in your weekly report, rather than technical terms and jargon. Misunderstandings often occur in communication. To maximize accuracy and efficiency, we recommend using the most straightforward language possible.

Fix weekly reports formats (templates). The report templates exist to simplify the process of report-making. Different teams will use different designs or templates. In any case, weekly tasks and progress must be presented in an informative, concise, and honest manner.

If you use Excel or Word to record weekly progress, you can find many free templates for download on the Internet. You make adaptive adjustments for your team based on their formats. However, for some manufacturing, financial, and sales departments, daily and weekly data are very large and complex. At this time, if you use Excel and Word to make a daily report, it often takes a lot of time to copy, paste and verify the data.

The solution is to introduce the automation technology of the report. For weekly reports with statistical complexity, it is possible to organize and calculate relevant data through automated procedures and generate seasonal reports based on preset templates.

The key lies in two points:

  • Template building 
  • Automatic generation of template-based reports. 

The so-called template building means that you only need to create a template once, and then you can directly apply it later. You only need to record the data, and then the report automation tool will directly compile the relevant data based on the template according to the planned timetable to form a report.

Here is a report template I made with FineReport. After setting up the data connection, it can automatically obtain the data to form a report.

Weekly Report Template
Weekly Report Template(by FineReport)


Deliver Weekly Reports Promptly

Generally, employees’ weekly reports should be sent to the boss’ mailbox regularly and on time, but they need to be sent each time manually. Once you have a temporary incident, it would cause a delay in reporting. This problem is also relatively easy to solve, as long as through task scheduling, you can publish the completed report regularly. Get free from the tireless repetitive publishing operations, and set up daily, monthly, quarterly, and annual reports conveniently and quickly, without additional work. 

Weekly Report Scheduling
Weekly Report Task Schedule (FineReport Decision Making Platform)
Weekly Report Scheduling
Weekly Report Task Schedule (FineReport Decision Making Platform)

Here, I set up the task schedule by using FineReport’s decision-making platform. The decision-making platform is the built-in report management system of FineReport. Through the decision-making platform, the administrator can perform authority assignments, user management, system management, etc.



Conclusion

The weekly report can help the team determine which plans have achieved positive/negative results and realize more efficient cooperation and more flexible adjustments.

In this article, we reviewed the definition and meaning of weekly reports and provided practical suggestions on how to make weekly reports. Also, I used FineReport as a demonstration to demonstrate how to automate weekly reports. FineReport is a professional enterprise-level report software and also offers a free personal version. If you are interested, why not try it?

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